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The Post Black Experience
( http://postblackexperience.com ). She continued, “Yet you have researchers studying high blood pressure, asthma among blacks, etc., and looking for a genetic cause. However, research shows these [illnesses] are the effects of racial inequality and the stress of racial inequality.” 5 Although ethics and emerging technologies is a discussion that all futurists are concerned with, Afrofuturists, in particular, are highly sensitive to how or if such technologies will deepen or transcend the imbalances of race.
Son of Saturn
    The alien motif reveals dissonance while also providing a prism through which to view the power of the imagination, aspiration, and creativity channeled in resisting dehumanization efforts. “The most important thing about Afrofuturism is to know that there have always been alternatives in what has been given in the present,” says Alexander Weheliye. “I am not making light of the history of enslavement and medical experimentation,” he continues, “but black people have always developed alternate ways of existing outside of these oppressions.”
    Improvisation, adaptability, and imagination are the core components of this resistance and are evident both in the arts and black cultures at large. Jazz, hip-hop, and blues are artistic examples, but there are ways of life that are based on improvisation, too, that aren’t fully understood. “Of all the thousands of tribes on the continent, what they all share is this respect for improvisation,” says Smith. “That idea in and of itself is a formof technology. In the Western world, improvisation is a failure; you do it when something goes wrong. But when black people improvise it’s a form of mastery.”
    In Reynaldo Anderson’s essay “Cultural Studies or Critical Afrofuturism: A Case Study in Visual Rhetoric, Sequential Art, and Post-Apocalyptic Black Identity,” he talks about the notion of twinness as a form of resistance that pulled on Africanisms but also was uniquely formulated for survival. This survival took place in postapocalyptic times, with the transatlantic slave trade being the apocalypse, he says. Noting that African slaves came from societies in which women and men had equal governing power, Anderson says that “to be a human being an individual should possess both masculine and feminine principles (protector-nurturer) in order to have a healthy community.” This twinness, he adds, was a survival mechanism “that enabled [women] to psychologically shield themselves and their inner lives.” However, he also says that rhetorical strategies include signifying, call-and-response, narrative sequencing, tonal semantics, technological rhetoric, agitation, nationalism, jeremiads, nommo, Africana womanist or black feminist epistemologies, queer studies, time and space, visual rhetoric, and culture as modes of resistance. 6 But the point of this alien and postapocalyptic metaphor, says Anderson, isn’t to get lost in traumas of the past or present-day alienation. The alien framework is a framework for understanding and healing.
    It’s the reason that D. Denenge Akpem teaches an Afrofuturism class as a pathway to liberation. “The basic premise of this course is that the creative ability to manifest action and transformation has been essential to the survival of Blacks in the Diaspora,” she says.
    The liberation edict in Afrofuturism provides a prism for evolution.

C an you imagine a world without the idea of race? Can you imagine a world where skin color, hair texture, national origin, and ethnicity are not determinants of power, class, beauty, or access?
    Some don’t want to imagine it; others are highly invested in the impossibility of it all. But let’s just talk about those who crave an end to injustice. Can these well-wishers see it? What does this world look like? What does it feel like? If you can’t see